A chronicle of Eileen and Chip's round-the-world jaunt.

Travel

April 18, 2010

Despite being the gateway town to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Carlsbad, New Mexico's restaurant owners appear to have no interest in garnering weekend business from the out-of-town tourists: all but a handful are closed both Saturday and Sunday. We were thus forced - FORCED, I tell you - to eat at Danny's BBQ again tonight after getting takeout from there yesterday.

Highly recommended to any of you who make it this way in the future. One telltale that they're doing it the right way: the pork ribs I had tonight were cooked properly over the fire, not steamed first and then finished off there. We sampled excellent brisket, pulled pork, and sausage as well as the ribs between our two meals.

April 13, 2010

Deep in the core of every truly great artist lies a truly great con man. That's not the official position of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, but it's certainly the implicit message of much of much of what you're told during the three and a half hour "Behind the Scenes" tour we took yesterday at Taliesin West, the winter campsite Wright and his acolytes started building in 1937, which the acolytes are still adding to today in the desert outside Phoenix (not always well - part of the Wright ethos for the students at this now-fully accredited architecture school is that that they must learn by doing, which in novice hands can frequently result in too much sand in the slurry when they're forming walls).

We're not in the inner circle of FLW devotees, but we've had the fortune of doing multiple Wright site visits over the years, all of them side trips we were able to tack onto other plans. We saw Fallingwater because it's only about 100 miles from the tiny coal town in Pennsylvania where Eileen's grandmother grew up; his Prairie School classic Darwin Martin House in Buffalo (at the time surrounded by a chain link fence and not open to the public) when my brother was married in that city; and the Oak Park buildings when we went to watch friends participating in the Gay Games in Chicago. All of them have been fascinating, but this Taliesin tour may have been the best if only because of the glimpses it gave us inside the Wright cult, where they seem to take as much delight in detailing the great man's cons as they do in celebrating his art: from the way he betrayed his mentor Louis Sullivan to his abandonment of his first marriage and family in Chicago to elope with his mistress to Europe. They're even quite happy to perpetuate Wright's own ability to stretch the truth for dramatic effect.

Take our guide yesterday, a soft-voiced self-described former literature student who now makes a full-time living at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, riding his bike across the broiling asphalt streets of Scottsdale six days a week to give Taliesin tours. Detailing Wright's expensive tastes and lifelong ability to live beyond his means, he repeated one of his favorite Wright quotes: "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves." Except as far as I can tell from a cursory bit of hunting this morning, it was Dorothy Parker, not Wright, who coined this aphorism. What Wright actually said isn't as pithy or as funny, and may well have been appropriating Parker: "Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without
the necessities." (Parker herself may have been appropriating Oscar Wilde.)

The guide's shading of the truth is in keeping with the sorts of stories Wright himself told repeatedly over the years, like this one: after failing to account for the footprint of a 9-foot piano when designing the stage of his "cabaret theater" at Taliesin West, Wright was forced by necessity to carve a niche for the baby grand out of the wall of the room. He liked it so much he subsequently put a similar niche in the design for a client's house. The mystified client, on first seeing the completed building, pointed out that not only didn't he own a piano, he didn't know how to play one. "Then you shall have to learn," Wright said in reply.

Or not. As our our guide told us, the conversation as he remembered it appears to be entirely a figment of Wright's own imagination, and there's no independent evidence it ever took place. But as Maxwell Scott once said, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

April 11, 2010

Top down driving through the desert may suit the faint of heart just fine, but not the fair of skin. The rules of the road for convertible travel are similar to those for a hike in the Galapagos, starting with sun protection. Our everyday routine begins when we lather up every exposed area of arm, face, ear, neck, and leg with sunscreen. You could tell how out of practice I was the morning after day one, after we had wound our way over mostly rural roads from San Francisco to Bakersfield: I had failed to adequately coat the back of my hands, and an area at the base of my thumb, along with a tiny strip of my wrist where I wear my watch, was lobster red.

Proper hat selection is also key. A broad-brimmed model may be fine for protecting the back of your neck as well as your face when you're walking a wildlife trail, but in the Miata you'd have to lock it down with bungee cords to protect it from being carried away by the constant buffeting of the wind. A baseball cap is the only viable alternative. Even that has to be pulled low over the eyes to keep it on, especially when there's a strong crosswind across the highway.

Another similarity to a hike: the need to pack plenty of water. Dehydration happens almost as fast when you're sitting in a bucket seat at 60 MPH as it does walking down a dusty trail.

Then there's the packing. For this trip, the nearly-unused custom luggage we bought a couple years ago from a Miata parts web site finally came in handy on this journey. It's a four-piece set designed to fit into every corner of the miniscule Miata trunk, plus a long, narrow bag designed to fit on the deck behind the seats. My knapsack-style camera bag substitutes for one of the smaller bags in the trunk without destroying the symmetry of how they fit together, and we've squeezed our travel toiletries kit and one or two other small items into the slivers of remaining space.

April 07, 2010

When you've already done the round-the-world tour, there's only one logical sequel: the drive across the country. Or at least, that's what we're telling ourselves as we spend our first night on the road on our latest grand-yet-entirely-unintended adventure.

Three months ago we were back from our globetrotting, the holidays were over, and we had just moved into a short-term rental in SF, leaving much of our the contents of the three-bedroom house we sold in late 2008 in storage as we began looking for work. We had already decided we weren't going to restrict ourselves to the Bay Area in that process. If the right opportunity came up on the East Coast, where we were both raised, we would consider returning. Our families were (mostly) there, for one thing, with Eileen's parents in Florida and mine in Connecticut.

We were barely settled into our temporary digs and making career plans, however, when tragedy intervened: on January 29th of this year, Eileen's mother Mary Ann and her sister Kate were driving in Kate's family minivan on a two-lane county road near their respective homes in central Florida when a woman at the wheel of an SUV in the opposite lane lost control, crossed the center line, and plowed into them. Mary Ann was hurt. Kate was killed.

I won't dwell on what this has meant for Kate's husband and children, or her four other siblings besides Eileen, or the many other people in her life. I will dwell on what it has meant for us, which is a change in focus. One virtue of our current joblessness is that we were able to spend the six weeks following the funeral in Florida staying with her parents while Mary Ann recovered from her physical injuries (thankfully nothing serious). It was then that we knew we'd be moving back to the East Coast for good, that SF was just too far away now. So it's back to our roots in the Northeast (for us, anyway, Florida is only for visiting, not for staying). Where, exactly, will depend on the job, but a city is a must.

Last Friday those few things we had taken out to furnish the temporary apartment went back into storage, to be shipped to us whenever we end up. A few bits of clothes and a camera bag went into the trunk of our 16-year-old Mazda Miata. With top down and sunscreen on we're off for a meandering trip across the Southwest, with no real plan or schedule except to make it East eventually. As much as we can we're going to stay off the interstates and on the Blue Highways. We'll visit at a few places we haven't seen yet, take a few pictures, and share as much of it as we can here.

Following our early-afternoon departure yesterday, we spent the night in Bakersfield, on our way to Death Valley National Park today, where the desert wildflowers are supposed to be blooming.

January 01, 2010

It's been a little more than two months since we touched down on American soil for the first time since January 20th of '09, but it's felt all along as if our trip hadn't really ended: the stops were all temporary, even when they lasted for several weeks, and the daily clothing choice still came down to what was in the luggage.

That's about to change. After interludes with our families, stops in New York and San Francisco, a quick side trip to Boston, a return to paradise for a few weeks, and some holiday visiting, we're back in San Francisco for at least a couple of months. Just yesterday we rented a SOMA apartment on a short-term lease, so by the beginning of the week we should be able to get at least some of our things out of storage and begin re-entering a more "normal" life. Now all we need is some income!

I'm not sure either of us is truly ready to admit that the adventure is over, but the turning of the New Year is helping force that realization upon us. Moving into semi-permanent digs will reinforce it. We're still deferring the biggest decisions - like which city will be our permanent home - until we get further into the job hunt, and yet all of that seems inevitable in a way it didn't a few months ago when we were sitting in a Land Rover in the Sabi Sands Reserve in South Africa watching a leopard on the hunt.

I still have more to say about our trip, as well as more photos to post, so I plan to keep this blog alive, although whether the posting will be as frequent as it was when we were on the road is hard to say at this point. More on that soon.